Despite a fine cast, George Axelrod's Faustian farce Will Success Spoil Rock
Hunter? is a "lost American classic" that may have been better left lost.
American Century Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, does have fun with this 1955 play,
which launched the career of Jayne Mansfield (she later starred in a film
"adaptation" that has the play's title and nothing else), but the rather slow
results suggest that there was little reason to bother.

For some reason, modern versions of the story of Faust selling his soul to the
devil were popular in the 1950s: Damn Yankees, with its similar plot, opened
on Broadway the same year. In this case, Axelrod takes on the Hollywood meat grinder
with its glamorous, empty-headed starlets and Machiavellian agents. The playwright
had a grudge against the era's Production Code, which would not allow the film
version of his previous work, The Seven Year Itch, to include the
consummation of the adulterous affair at its heart; this play offers a principled
playwright (John Tweel) whose Broadway hit concerns the tortured but unfilmable
affair between a prostitute and a gay psychiatrist.

The main plot follows nerdy George MacCauley (Donald Osborne), an unsuccessful
hack writer and blank slate who gains success and the love of blonde sex bomb Rita
Marlowe (Kari Ginsburg) with the supernatural help of the most powerful agent in
Tinseltown, Irving "Sneaky" LaSalle (Steven Lebens). (Audiences in 1955 would
recognize the name as a parody of a real Hollywood power broker, Irving "Swifty"
Lazar.)

While Mansfield left big ... shoes ...to fill as the self-absorbed Rita, Ginsburg
captures the character's babyish, squeaky-breathy voice and astonishing
condescension to those around her: when George first comes to interview her, she
can't remember his name. Osborne is well cast as a fundamentally decent man whoeven when his soul is at stakewants what's best for those around him, and Lebens
is a sleek embodiment of evil. Craig Miller provides an incisive portrait of a
studio head, and Tweel makes his character real rather than the author's
self-congratulatory reflection.

Director Ellen Dempsey does her best with the pacing, but the action still drags
in the middle; eliminating the second intermission could have helped. Anndi
Daleske's scenic design uses a few well-chosen pieces of furniture to create the
1950s ambiance, while Rip Claassen's costume design includes one particular triumph
of gold lamé and white gauze.